


Red

by Sir_Bedevere



Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms
Genre: Animal Death, Brief discussion of anatomy, Gen, M/M, Obsession, but it's only briefly mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-02 04:06:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16297835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sir_Bedevere/pseuds/Sir_Bedevere
Summary: As soon as he was old enough to walk, she wished that she possessed the streak of cruelty that would see fit to lock him away entirely. It would be so much easier for both of them, to keep him confined.Erik has always loved passionately, obsessively. How do the targets of his affection deal with the spotlight glare of his dangerous love?





	Red

**Author's Note:**

  * For [outruntheavalanche](https://archiveofourown.org/users/outruntheavalanche/gifts).



(i)

As soon as he was old enough to walk, she wished that she possessed the streak of cruelty that would see fit to lock him away entirely. It would be so much easier for both of them, to keep him confined. 

She could tell herself that keeping him in the house was for his own good, but she could not remain unmoved by her son’s pitiful cries and the incessant weeping, and would not lock the door to his attic room and leave him completely to himself.

So they remained in the house, the both of them prisoners, and she hated him. How could she not? The boy was sick, deformed and ugly, and she had no one and nothing for company except him. And he, in turn, had not a single comfort that a better mother might have been able to give him.

It was so sad, for the both of them, that she had long given up on her own tears.

And then Erik got older, and he found his voice, when all he had done before was weep. 

She had taught him to read, a way to pass the time, and he grew to love the books. He wanted more of them, more than the few she kept in the house, and from the books she could find, damaged and ancient from the market, he learned of music and drawing. He spent hours at the old piano in the dining room, and he asked for more things than she could afford - paper and paint and ink. He would stand before her, and fix his strange yellow eyes upon her face, and she would yield to his demands. He would smirk, and she would not know why.

She made the mistake once of bringing him a book on anatomy, thinking the unfamiliar words would slow him down and give her a few days of peace. And he was quiet, very quiet, and it was a relief, until she discovered why. For whilst he had been shut up with his book, he had been catching birds from his window and mice from the kitchen, and had them laid out beneath his bed with pins in their wings and feet. He’d used a good knife from the kitchen to slice them open and the smell – she vomited into the chamber pot and threw the cursed things from the window down into the garden below. He said nothing about it, but the knife was not returned to its proper place.

He was nine years old when she first woke to find him watching her in her sleep. The room was dark, but she caught the flash of his white mask, and knew instantly that he was there with her.

“Erik,” she said, her voice stronger than she would have expected. “What do you want?”

For too long a moment, he did not speak, and it was as though both of them held their breath. 

“I do not know, Mother,” he said eventually. “I woke up and I was here.”

“Go to bed,” she snapped, and he left so quickly that she could convince herself he had been telling the truth.

Until the next time.

She woke to his cold hand resting on her chest, as though a ghost had hold of her heart, and she pushed his arm away. 

“What are you doing?”

“Feeling your heart beating,” he said, like it was the most natural thing in the world. “And hearing how you breathe.”

His voice was matter of fact in the darkness and that was perhaps the worst thing of all; that he thought it was normal. 

“I am not one of your animals to be examined,” she said, trying to keep her mind from the tortured, dissected creatures she had found beneath his bed. “And you will never touch me without my permission.”

A pause, too long again, and then a hard edge to his voice. 

“Yes, Mother.”  
(ii)

She always knew that he would come back for her in the end.

Antoinette was sixteen the first time she saw him. Sixteen and taken to the travelling circus, though her parents knew full well that she could hardly stand the sadness of the beasts entrapped there. 

So, naturally, she slipped away to hide in a tent that seemed abandoned by its busy owner. But as her eyes got used to the gloom, she saw the cage.

And heard the breathing.

Laboured breathing, as though the poor creature within would soon expire from the effort of it. So she crept closer, fool that she was, and that’s when she saw the man.

No – a boy. He could not be any older than she was, slender at the waist and shoulders, but tall. Very tall. His head rested on a filthy pillow and he could barely lift it to look at her. It was like a nightmare – how he slowly turned his head and his face – and Antoinette screamed. She remembered only screaming and then a hand, so cold, shot through the bars to grasp her wrist. 

His eyes glowed, like a cat…or some monster from under the bed. 

“Don’t,” he rasped. “Please.”

Without really trying, she stopped screaming. There was something in his voice that she could not place, something that compelled her, pulled at something deep in her chest. His fingers loosened and she tugged her hand away, but she did not run. That was her mistake, of course. She knows that now. She should have run. 

It was just one step from not running to feeling sorry for him, another to sneaking back the next day and the next and the next, and just one more, to helping him escape. 

Sometimes, as she got older, she would think of that strange boy and what had become of him. He had committed no crime, as far as she knew, except of being born ugly, but on occasion she would think of the cage and the chains and wonder what she had released into the world.  
When Antoinette was thirty, she moved into the Opera Garnier and when she was thirty one, Meg was born. Meg was three years old when she ran away in the park, and Antoinette spent the next hour fretting so much that she thought she would never be calm again. When Meg appeared again, skipping and smiling and none the worse for her adventure, she said that the funny man in the mask had caught her running out of the gate and told her to return to her mother. 

_The man in the mask._

Then when she was fifty years old, it seemed the most natural thing to turn a corner in the corridors of the Opera Garnier to find those familiar eyes watching her. This time, she did not scream. 

“Hello, Erik,” she said instead. “I knew I would see you again.”

Long, icy cold fingers encircled her wrist and traced over her brow and she almost – almost – succeeded in not shuddering. 

“You are afraid.”

“I’m not afraid of you, Erik.”

A low chuckle, dark and rich, warmer than his hands. That voice.

“I have come home. To you. Are you pleased?”

_Home, to you._

“I am glad that you are well. It was you, wasn’t it? Who stopped my Meg from running?”

He seized her face and brought it close to his, and still she did not scream. She would not give him what he wanted. 

“You helped me once. I helped you. And now you will help me again,” he said, after a moment of scrutiny. 

“Anything,” she said, and meant it, for surely it was better to have the beast half tamed than roving unchecked in the wilds. 

(iii)

The Shah had offered Nadir many women over his years of service, but he had never taken up the offer. If anyone ever asked him why, he said that he loved his work, and the work was enough. 

But the Shah collected people, as though they were trinkets, and when he got tired of them, he threw them away. Nadir had always known that he was living on borrowed time. 

He had not known that the eventual reason for his fall from favour would be a skinny, sickly Frenchman. But then, Erik was always unexpected. 

Nadir had not recoiled when he saw the conjurer’s face for the first time. He thought it some trick, and when he was shown otherwise, by then it was too late to be afraid. Besides, he had only that week seen a man murdered, his head staved in and his brains leaking onto the dusty ground and, by comparison, Erik’s face was not such a horror.

Erik was the favourite for a while, and Nadir rarely saw him, for he was busy with his work. He heard stories though, of the mysterious magician and his tricks; of how the Shah had tried to force him into bed with his young women and the man had refused every time. The stories were half-formed but never lacking in detail, and Nadir did not miss the look that the storytellers would give him when they thought he wasn’t looking. He was sure that such stories were also whispered about him. 

It was hardly a surprise when Erik came to his rooms, late one night. Nadir was quite sure that the man had been watching him for a while. 

“I have never met a person more reserved than myself,” Erik said carefully, in his halting Arabic. “And yet here you are.”

Someone had crafted him a mask of finest silk, and it made his face seem softer in the candlelight. There was even a hint of a smile on those bloated, pale lips.

“Please sit down,” Nadir gestured to the couch. “Some coffee?”

Erik reminded Nadir of a cat, one of the spoiled ones that lived among the Shah’s women. He stretched his long frame out on the couch, and watched every move that Nadir made in a way that felt almost – proprietorial. As though he belonged here, and had decided that he would stay until he was thrown out by the scruff of his neck. 

“We are both ill-suited to this place,” Erik said instead of a thank you when he was handed a cup. “He will tire of my tricks. And he is already tired of you.”

Nadir did not flinch at the words, for he felt as though that was what the man wanted. 

“Ah, my friend,” he said. “I have long known that my days here are numbered.”

There was nowhere to sit aside from the couch that Erik had claimed, so Nadir sat. Erik would move, or he would not, and it was all the same to him. 

Erik did move, but only to sit up and peer speculatively through his mask at Nadir’s face. Nadir sipped his coffee and let him stare; it wasn’t as though he hadn’t been doing it already. The footsteps in the darkness that had followed him for the weeks, the heavy drapes around his bed that seemed to have moved by their own accord in the night. 

“I followed you,” Erik hissed through gritted teeth. “To a place of disrepute. What would our master say, if you knew what you had been doing?”

“He would not, I fear, be surprised. I have turned down his women often enough.”

Nadir forced his voice to remain calm, but his eyes closed on their own accord when the back of Erik’s hand came to brush against his cheek. His face was burning, or perhaps Erik’s hand was cold, but there was a tightness in his chest and he found himself having trouble breathing.

“Look at me.”

It was a gentle demand, but Nadir obeyed. Erik had removed his mask. Up close, the deformity was even less troubling – just skin and bone in the wrong place. Hardly a horror.

“You see me, Daroga,” Erik said, his hand turning so his fingertips traced the shape of Nadir’s cheek.

“I do.”

“You are not afraid.”

“I am not. You are only a man.”

Of all the things he was expecting – not least a broken neck – it was not the gentle touch of Erik’s lips to his cheek that undid him, but the press of the man’s forehead against his own. He brought up his own hand and caught Erik’s before it could pull away. 

A moment, a heartbeat, and then Erik was up on his feet. 

“You should not trust me,” he said, securing his mask back around his face. “Be careful where you step, policeman.”

When Nadir woke later that night, curled on the couch, he could not be sure that it hadn’t all been a dream. 

(iv)

Papa said he would send an angel, the Angel of Music, and he did. Christine had never doubted him for a moment. 

The Angel of Music burned like fire in her mind, and he made her voice burn like fire in her chest, and she only hoped that one day she would do well enough that she could look upon his beautiful face. 

Madame Giry heard first of the angel who had come to the earth, and she called Christine to her rooms one evening after dinner. 

“Have you seen this angel?” she asked. “Where did he come from?”

“Papa sent him, as he said he would. But the angel is shy. He hides in the shadows and teaches me to sing. He says one day I will take Carlotta’s place.”

Madame Giry nodded, her lips tight and pinched. 

“If your angel ever asks – if he wishes to show his face to you – will you tell me? Promise me that you will.”

“I promise,” Christine said, although she did not understand why. 

In the end she did understand, of course. 

The angel was vengeful, as vengeful as the god Christine had been so afraid of when she was a little girl, and he was jealous too. She was sure that she dreamed the first trip down into the depths of the opera house, except that she saw his face, and in the morning, she had bruises around her wrist from where he had gripped her. 

She did not tell Madame Giry. She did not have to. The woman came to her as soon as she was released back into the opera house, and she already knew. 

Then the angel killed Bucquet, who was a horrid man but who did not deserve to die, and he dropped the chandelier on the stage, and still he would come to sing to Christine in her dreams. His voice was soft, like the music Papa used to play for her, and although she knew that his hands could be cruel, she always dreamed they were as gentle as his voice. 

And it ended in fire. 

Her angel was a man – only a fearsome, lonely, desperate man – and as the opera house burned around her, Christine realised it would always have ended that way. He had burned her, branded his name into her heart, and she would never be free of him. As she watched the flames leap high into the night sky, she thought of him and how he was gentle and dangerous, and how he did not deserve to die such a terrible death, for surely no one could deserve such a thing.

The fires could cleanse the earth, but they would scar it. They could cleanse her heart, but they would scar that too.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you like your trick, outruntheavalanche! You had loads of great prompts but this one really caught my attention :)
> 
> Thanks to my beloved iberiandoctor for the beta <3


End file.
